Eating Vegetables Could Make You Happier

I'll be honest, I had my first legal drink before I had my first salad.  You couldn't pay me to eat my veggies when I was growing up.  It wasn't for lack of trying, either!  I tried salad a few times as a teenager, and I only managed to choke down a single bite each time before just giving up.  Something finally clicked in my early twenties, though; and now I don't just eat vegetables, I downright crave them sometimes.  Well it turns out that feeding those veggie cravings could help you feel better emotionally as well as physically!Daniel Blanchflower, of Dartmouth University, recently conducted a study involving 20,000 people in Great Britain, according to the Washington Post.  He found that people who ate produce on a daily basis were more satisfied with their lives, and had a higher state of mental well-being.  The more daily servings, the higher the subjects rated their lives on a scale of one to ten.

Those who consumed eight or more servings of vegetables daily rated themselves 0.27 points happier, on average, than those who had no servings to speak of. The effect was strongest for those who ate seven servings of produce daily. After that, grabbing a handful of carrots doesn't seem to have much of an effect.

[via Washington Post.]

Of course, there are two ways to look at this: Does eating healthy make you happier, or does being happy make you want to eat healthy?  What do you think?